"Best of..." Interviews: Second Installment
Here are a couple more of the great interview questions I've received since Getting Somewhere came out. This is the second installment and I'll plan to have one more. (And if YOU have a question you’d like to ask, send me a message here at Goodreads and I may post it with my response!)
From Amaterasu Reads
What does it feel like to have a published book?
They say it’s like having a baby – the initial excitement, the long wait, and eventual flurry of pain, relief, exhilaration, and exhaustion. I suppose this is as good a metaphor as any and yet, even though I’ve had four kids of my own, the best preparation I could have had for the experience of writing a book and having it published has been the nearly thirty years I spent as an organic vegetable farmer.
People I knew were pretty surprised when I told them I planned to quit farming, was resigning as manager of the farmers market and director of the not-for-profit I had founded, and that I hoped to become a writer. They were further surprised to discover that I had no intentions of writing about agriculture (at least, not directly!) or sustainability or community planning or any of the other topics I’d devoted my career to so far. What they really couldn’t have known, though – and I didn’t either – was that the experience of farming had, in many unpredicted ways, prepared me well for some of the things I would need to learn as a new author.
Like patience. Is there anyone who truly considers themselves patient? I certainly tried my best to be patient with my kids. And farming is nothing if not an exercise in patience. You know those gorgeous red-ripe tomatoes you love to buy at the farmers market? Well, we farmers plant those seeds in February, nurture baby plants along until they can tolerate the outdoors, weed around them for months, watch them carefully as they ripen, finally bring them to customers a good six months later. And none of this includes the months before spent perusing seed catalogs, selecting varieties, comparing records, crunching numbers, or the previous years dedicated to creating a fertile garden in the first place.
Writing a book is nearly exactly like that. It’s a whole lot of ‘hurry up and wait.’ All of your experiences have collided to create this book in the first place. You’ve spent varying amounts of time getting those perfect words recorded. And you certainly have an idea of what your ultimate goal might be (a published book!) But even once you’ve done the research to determine where to send the manuscript, even after you’ve found an agent and the agent has sold your book to a
publisher, there are so many steps along the way and so many chunks of time when you are simply waiting for the process to unfold.
I guess that’s why they call it ‘practicing’ patience.
And still, for all your best efforts in identifying and pursuing all the necessary resources, you really have very little control over the outcome. Some of it certainly comes down to hard work, some of it is timing, and some of it is just simply dumb luck (sort of like the weather.) And though it may be kind of hard to believe, that’s actually a good thing – recognizing that all you can ensure is the integrity of the process, the quality of the relationships built along
the way.
In many ways, that’s been the best part of becoming a writer and the part where my farming experience has turned out to be most relevant. It doesn’t matter how perfect that tomato turns out to be if nobody ever picks it up, admires it, savors the lovely flavor. Especially with organic farming, each vegetable is truly a labor of love. It matters who eats it, who shares with you a recipe they used to prepare it, who comes back to find more just like it. And writing is the same
way.
Authors care what people think. A book is a special kind of relationship, characterized by the nature of the story, the voice chosen to tell it and the total vulnerability we risk to present it.
In the same way that my farmers market customers wanted to be connected to the food they ate and the people who grew it, readers seek stories that will make them feel connected to something larger than themselves, that tell them something about the world of the author, the world as a whole, and, maybe more importantly, something about themselves. I am honored by the opportunity to give that to them. And of course, that’s exactly what authors want too and are
willing to go to a whole lot of trouble to get it.
From One A Day YA
Describe your main characters. If they were real people, would you be friends with them?
Getting Somewhere is the story of four very different girls who have been convicted of juvenile crimes and choose to serve out their sentences in an alternative detention program located on an organic farm. The narrative switches back and forth between the girls, providing each one’s perspective on the very challenging experiences she is confronting in this unfamiliar environment.
We are introduced first to Jenna who is described as someone who would willingly push others out of the way to get where she has to go. And yet she is, of course, much more complex than that, having been shuffled around from foster home to foster home, eventually landing in juvenile detention as a result of taking the fall for much more hardened (and sophisticated) criminals. She’s turned her hurt into a shell and we are given the opportunity to watch while that shell either weakens a bit and falls away or installs itself as a permanent burden on her back. Cassie, on the other hand, has no experience of the world at all. She has spent her childhood living in an isolated trailer with her grandmother, who has gradually deteriorated mentally, leaving Cassie as the primary caretaker. Their only outside connection is with Cassie’s uncle who, while keeping them alive and fed, turns out to be more curse than blessing. Cassie’s crime does not become clear until late in the book but her personal struggle to fit in, to find something she can call ‘self,’ is a vibrant theme throughout the story. Then there’s Sarah. She ran away from home at thirteen and, as happens to so many girls on the street, becomes the victim of drugs and prostitution. At first, the farm simply means a warm bed and hot meals but she is hard-pressed to resist the pressures – of all kinds – to participate in the drama that ensues there. The last girl is Lauren. She’s a thief and a manipulator and yet no less a victim of the poor decisions of the adults around her than the others. While I don’t know anyone exactly like Lauren – or any of the others, for that matter – there is a little piece of each one of them in all of us. And as one very wise writer said recently, you have to fall a little bit in love with your characters, no matter how difficult. At times, I just want to give each of them a great big hug!
From Amaterasu Reads
What does it feel like to have a published book?
They say it’s like having a baby – the initial excitement, the long wait, and eventual flurry of pain, relief, exhilaration, and exhaustion. I suppose this is as good a metaphor as any and yet, even though I’ve had four kids of my own, the best preparation I could have had for the experience of writing a book and having it published has been the nearly thirty years I spent as an organic vegetable farmer.
People I knew were pretty surprised when I told them I planned to quit farming, was resigning as manager of the farmers market and director of the not-for-profit I had founded, and that I hoped to become a writer. They were further surprised to discover that I had no intentions of writing about agriculture (at least, not directly!) or sustainability or community planning or any of the other topics I’d devoted my career to so far. What they really couldn’t have known, though – and I didn’t either – was that the experience of farming had, in many unpredicted ways, prepared me well for some of the things I would need to learn as a new author.
Like patience. Is there anyone who truly considers themselves patient? I certainly tried my best to be patient with my kids. And farming is nothing if not an exercise in patience. You know those gorgeous red-ripe tomatoes you love to buy at the farmers market? Well, we farmers plant those seeds in February, nurture baby plants along until they can tolerate the outdoors, weed around them for months, watch them carefully as they ripen, finally bring them to customers a good six months later. And none of this includes the months before spent perusing seed catalogs, selecting varieties, comparing records, crunching numbers, or the previous years dedicated to creating a fertile garden in the first place.
Writing a book is nearly exactly like that. It’s a whole lot of ‘hurry up and wait.’ All of your experiences have collided to create this book in the first place. You’ve spent varying amounts of time getting those perfect words recorded. And you certainly have an idea of what your ultimate goal might be (a published book!) But even once you’ve done the research to determine where to send the manuscript, even after you’ve found an agent and the agent has sold your book to a
publisher, there are so many steps along the way and so many chunks of time when you are simply waiting for the process to unfold.
I guess that’s why they call it ‘practicing’ patience.
And still, for all your best efforts in identifying and pursuing all the necessary resources, you really have very little control over the outcome. Some of it certainly comes down to hard work, some of it is timing, and some of it is just simply dumb luck (sort of like the weather.) And though it may be kind of hard to believe, that’s actually a good thing – recognizing that all you can ensure is the integrity of the process, the quality of the relationships built along
the way.
In many ways, that’s been the best part of becoming a writer and the part where my farming experience has turned out to be most relevant. It doesn’t matter how perfect that tomato turns out to be if nobody ever picks it up, admires it, savors the lovely flavor. Especially with organic farming, each vegetable is truly a labor of love. It matters who eats it, who shares with you a recipe they used to prepare it, who comes back to find more just like it. And writing is the same
way.
Authors care what people think. A book is a special kind of relationship, characterized by the nature of the story, the voice chosen to tell it and the total vulnerability we risk to present it.
In the same way that my farmers market customers wanted to be connected to the food they ate and the people who grew it, readers seek stories that will make them feel connected to something larger than themselves, that tell them something about the world of the author, the world as a whole, and, maybe more importantly, something about themselves. I am honored by the opportunity to give that to them. And of course, that’s exactly what authors want too and are
willing to go to a whole lot of trouble to get it.
From One A Day YA
Describe your main characters. If they were real people, would you be friends with them?
Getting Somewhere is the story of four very different girls who have been convicted of juvenile crimes and choose to serve out their sentences in an alternative detention program located on an organic farm. The narrative switches back and forth between the girls, providing each one’s perspective on the very challenging experiences she is confronting in this unfamiliar environment.
We are introduced first to Jenna who is described as someone who would willingly push others out of the way to get where she has to go. And yet she is, of course, much more complex than that, having been shuffled around from foster home to foster home, eventually landing in juvenile detention as a result of taking the fall for much more hardened (and sophisticated) criminals. She’s turned her hurt into a shell and we are given the opportunity to watch while that shell either weakens a bit and falls away or installs itself as a permanent burden on her back. Cassie, on the other hand, has no experience of the world at all. She has spent her childhood living in an isolated trailer with her grandmother, who has gradually deteriorated mentally, leaving Cassie as the primary caretaker. Their only outside connection is with Cassie’s uncle who, while keeping them alive and fed, turns out to be more curse than blessing. Cassie’s crime does not become clear until late in the book but her personal struggle to fit in, to find something she can call ‘self,’ is a vibrant theme throughout the story. Then there’s Sarah. She ran away from home at thirteen and, as happens to so many girls on the street, becomes the victim of drugs and prostitution. At first, the farm simply means a warm bed and hot meals but she is hard-pressed to resist the pressures – of all kinds – to participate in the drama that ensues there. The last girl is Lauren. She’s a thief and a manipulator and yet no less a victim of the poor decisions of the adults around her than the others. While I don’t know anyone exactly like Lauren – or any of the others, for that matter – there is a little piece of each one of them in all of us. And as one very wise writer said recently, you have to fall a little bit in love with your characters, no matter how difficult. At times, I just want to give each of them a great big hug!
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